1) the state of children's teeth - a largish percentage of over 12 year-olds don't smile because they are self-conscious - about their bad teeth. I find myself wondering if one of the reasons for this is the increase in HUGE bags of sweets being sold.
At one time - OK, back when I was a child - when sweets were sold loosely for the most part, you went into a shop and asked for a 1/4 of whatever sweets you fancied: mint imperials, sherbet lemons, bonbons, pineapple chunks or whatever else there was on offer. 1/4 meant a quarter of a pound. Four ounces. If you were eking your pocket money you bought two ounces. And you took away your purchases in a paper bag. The thing was that the amount you bought was limited. And so the number of sweets eaten was limited. Nowadays you find enormous bags of sweets, enough for a whole family, being bought by one person. There are parents who limit how many their offspring can eat from this bag but it's a lot harder to do.
And there are increasing numbers of "old fashioned" sweetshops popping up, specialising in old fashioned sweets sold at extortionate prices in little paper bags. (I even saw one recently called "A Quarter of Sweets". How many of the younger generation will understand the name, I wonder.) But, given a choice between a small paper bag of sweets from a fancy shop or a huge bag of the same sweets from the supermarket for the same price as the small one, most people opt for the supermarket super-size me bag!
2) the partial eclipse of the sun tomorrow morning. News programmes are giving us all advice on how to view this phenomenon without ruining our eyesight by looking at it directly. The best one I heard was using a kitchen colander. You stand in such a position that the sun's rays shine through the holes in the colander and project an image of the eclipse onto the pavement. It's a bigger version of the pinhole camera. If the sky is not full of clouds tomorrow morning I will try it out. However, there is a strong chance that it will be cloudy.
Today, by contrast, has been fine and sunny. They must not be expecting the cloud cover to move in over the next few hours because I saw a gritter out an hour ago, spreading grit to prevent accidents on potentially icy roads. Mind you, earlier today when I was out and about a chap sitting sunning himself in his front garden told me that snow is forecast for next week. He puts it down to global warming! This is the scapegoat for all our weather problems at the moment, of course. 
I also came across a barge selling pots of spring flowers on the canal in Uppermill. It looked very picturesque. And I must say that it seems like an enterprising idea. If they manage to sell just a few they will make quite a lot of money. I don't think I saw a pot costing less than £15.
Back to the market for me!
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